Consultation: Draft report to the Secretary of State on the designation of television selection services

Under the new online availability and prominence regime introduced by the Media Act, connected TV platforms (referred to as ‘television selection services’) designated by the Secretary of State will be required to ensure that BBC iPlayer and public service broadcaster TV players designated by Ofcom, as well as their public service content, are available, prominent, and easily accessible.

As part of Ofcom’s implementation work, we must provide a report to the Secretary of State setting out our recommendations on the designation of television selection services. Following a consultation, we published our Statement of Principles and Methods in April 2025. Having applied these principles and methods, we are now consulting on our proposed recommendations on designation.

What we are proposing:

This report makes recommendations about the TSS that we consider should be designated. In doing so, we have assessed the number of users of TSS using what we consider to be the best available metric – the number of TSS installed on internet television equipment devices in UK homes that have been actively used in the last year. 

In applying this metric, we propose that a TSS must have at least 700,000 active users if it is to be considered to have a significant number of users. We consider that setting a threshold at this level will ensure that public service content is widely available taking into account the trends in audience viewing.  

We recognise that, for some TSS, multiple versions may be in use. In those cases, we propose that the designations should apply only to the currently available versions of those TSS – i.e. those versions of a TSS available on the market in July 2025 – as well as any future versions made available while the designations are in place. We adopted this approach when setting and applying the threshold.  

Finally, we also considered the levels of take-up by different audience groups – which we don’t consider to be a significant factor at this time – and whether trends in active use indicated any TSS above the threshold were unlikely to remain so for a reasonable period of time – which applies in one case. 

Taking the above into account, our provisional view is that relevant versions of the following 14 TSS should be designated: Amazon Fire TV OS; Android TV; Apple TV OS; Google TV; LG WebOS; Roku OS; Samsung Smart Hub (Tizen); Sky Entertainment OS;  Sky Q; VIDAA OS; Virgin Media Horizon; Virgin Media TiVo on V6 devices; YouView on EE TV (Sagemcom devices); YouView on Sony devices.  

We plan to publish our finalised report to the Secretary of State later this year, following which they will make regulations to determine which television selection service will be regulated.

Responding to this consultation

Submit responses using the consultation response form no later than 5pm 16 September 2025.